Introduction

Trending YouTube videos capture what is going on in the world through a variety of different categories. YouTube videos are something that almost everyone in the United States is familiar with. However, the types of videos and the logistics behind the videos that make the trending section are not as well known. In this report we will analyze what factors support videos making it into YouTube’s trending section through summaries, tables, and visual representations of our findings from our data set. The data set we will be using to conduct this analysis was created and organized by Rishav Sharma. We pulled the data set on November 14th, 2020 and thus the data we are analyzing contains values from August 12th, 2020 to November 14th, 2020. It is important to note that our analysis is only for videos in the United States and does not contain correlations between the factors we are analyzing and other countries.

Summary Information

Our dataset has 18798 rows and 16 columns.

The earliest date in our dataset is 2020-08-03 and the latest recorded date is 2020-11-14.

These are the column names: video_id, title, publishedAt, channelId, channelTitle, categoryId, trending_date, tags, view_count, likes, dislikes, comment_count, thumbnail_link, comments_disabled, ratings_disabled, description.

Aggregate Table

Charts

Average Viewership Per Day

This plot displays the average amount of views trending videos recieved on a given day (Sunday to Saturday). We created this chart to see if there is a relationship between average viewership and the day of the week.

This graph clearly shows that trending videos on Friday receive nearly triple the average viewership. Additionally, Wednesday is a particularly slow day for YouTube videos. This may mean that popular creators should attempt to have a video on the trending page every Friday because this is when they would likely receive the highest viewership.

Boxplot Graph

This graph shows the variation of the time it takes a video to reach the trending page after it’s published. Most of the data is concentrated between the 0 to 5 day range, while there are some outliers above 10 days for most categories. Interestingly enough, the graph also included values with negative values. This is because the published date includes the full date and time, whereas the trending date only includes the month and day. For videos to have a negative value of days it took to reach the trending page, it means that the video was wildly popular enough to be trending on the same date it was uploaded.